Webinar Recording: When Leadership Sabotages Strategy – What Growth-Driven Leadership Requires in 2026

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:00:00 +0200
Aalto Leaders' Insight

Rethink leadership, challenge outdated assumptions, and explore what effective, growth-oriented strategy execution requires today.

In many organizations, strategy and leadership drift apart; the strategy evolves, but leadership practices and systems don’t keep up. This webinar recording offers a fresh, provocative look at what leaders must do to enable growth in 2026.

Associate Professor of Strategic Management at Aalto University Timo Vuori, and Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Hintsa Performance, as well as Professor of Practice at Aalto University, Juha Äkräs, will challenge some of the most common assumptions about strategy, leadership, and the systems that shape how leaders operate.

Speakers

Timo Vuori, Associate Professor of Strategic Management at Aalto University School of Science

His research on the psychological aspects of strategic management has been published in leading international journals and won several international awards. He has taught and presented his research at leading universities like Harvard and INSEAD.

Professor Vuori's research and teaching focus on how companies formulate and execute strategies. He has written two books with senior business executives on these topics. "Living Strategy" describes scenario-based strategy making in an ever-changing world. "Platform Strategy" describes how incumbent firms should and can renew themselves in the digital era. The books detail both the "hard" factors, such as technology and business models, and "soft" factors, such as people and psychology, influencing strategy and renewal.

Professor Vuori works extensively with companies, often collaborating with a leading strategy consulting company. Vuori helps the client organization formulate and evaluate several strategic options in strategy formulation projects. He uses advanced psychological techniques to help leaders unleash their strategic creativity and overcome thinking myopias and personal biases. This approach is based on his cutting-edge international research, also described in the Platform Strategy.

In strategy execution projects, Professor Vuori specializes in helping the client firm optimize the psychological engagement of the whole organization. He analyses the psychological impact of the intended strategy execution program and modifies it to maximally leverage the emotions of the organization's members for effectiveness.

Juha Äkräs, Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Hintsa Performance and Professor of Practice at Aalto University School of Business, Department of Management

Juha Äkräs has worked as Executive Vice President, Human Resources at Nokia Oyj and as a member of the Nokia Executive Board and Nokia Siemens Networks Board of Directors. Before these, he worked in multiple business management roles, including Senior Vice President of Core Networks at Nokia Networks. He has held multiple positions of trust in business and non-profit organizations.

Currently, he is co-leading a research program called “The Exponential Work Project: Cascading Wellbeing, Climate & Organizational Performance” – a joint research project by Aalto University, Hintsa Performance, and Ilmarinen.

Juha Äkräs holds a Master of Science in Engineering from the Helsinki University of Technology and has studied Industrial Management, Work Psychology, and Telecommunications.